I'm having issues with grub. Let me provide some details about my situation. I had a dual boot set up with xp & gentoo. Recently I built a new system and I went ahead and added a third drive with windows 7 on it. After putting the new box together and booting, I've had issues getting grub to boot. My current set up is as follows

Your boot partition of gentoo reside on first partition (sdb1) but for grub this is a partition 0

You have an grub error 17 because a boot loader search a file to (hd1,0) but now this is a Windows 7 disk

Under grub , use root (hd2,0) and setup (hd0)

BUT BEFORE : please what about your linux kernel config
Before you put Windows 7 disk, what you see under linux 'hda and sda' or 'sda and sdb'
Your gentoo disk became SDB or SDD depending of kernel config.
Do not miss to change fstab to (sdb to sdd or sda to sdb) .......

To be sure, remove connector of Windows 7 disk, put them to Gentoo disk and reboot
Verify by "fdisk -l' (you see hda/sda or sda/sdb)
hda-sda -> sda became sdb
sda/sdb -> sdb became sdd

"Under grub , use root (hd2,0) and setup (hd0) " do you mean that I should fire up the grub shell do the following:

root (hd2,0)
setup (hd0)

wait until i get a message that grub installed correctly?

You are correct, gentoo went from sda to sdb. I have made edits to my fstab to reflect the new changes. Please let me know if I'm on the right track?_________________Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition
MSI ATI R4650 PCIe2
250GB SATA Drive
4GB Corsair DDR2

I went ahead and installed grub on (hd0) without any error messages. I rebooted and after waiting for a while, i get an error that i cant mount a partition. I'm not getting the typical purple grub menu with the different options. It does give you the option to press any key to continue which i did. When you do this, it takes you to the grub menu, but it's black & white and fuzzy. I tried booting into xp and it worked. Then, because over time I've compiled a few kernels, some of them which dont work, I selected the one that was working and it booted into gentoo. Of course since my new system now has an ATI card and the old one had an Nvidia, xorg failed. I'm in the process of fixing that problem. However, I didnt not see windows 7 as one the options in the menu? any ideas as to why? also, how can fix the grub menu being fuzzy and in black & white? Thansk for all your help._________________Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition
MSI ATI R4650 PCIe2
250GB SATA Drive
4GB Corsair DDR2

Whate about fdisk -l /dev/sda
Two solution for me : you have one partition / two partition
One partition -> (hd1,0)
Two partition -> windows 7 create one small partititon for 'restore system' utilities, he use this partition to boot (hd1,0)

will make changes you suggested and try again. Im looking into ati drivers but my eth0 is not being detected during boot which is weird because when i used the livecd it did. i ran "ifconfig eth0" and get this:

your suggestion about the changes to grub.conf regarding windows 7 worked. windows 7 is now an option in grub menu. However, when i select windows 7, screens goes blank and it returns to grub menu. Do you think I may need to change the partition setup in grub.conf

your suggestion about the changes to grub.conf regarding windows 7 worked. windows 7 is now an option in grub menu. However, when i select windows 7, screens goes blank and it returns to grub menu. Do you think I may need to change the partition setup in grub.conf

from

(hd1,0)

to (hd1,1)

Try it no promise,

Remember Windows NEEDS to be on drive C: to boot but you have another Windows install !!
Three Solution :
1)
under bios reverse disk order (sda/hda/sdb) install grub bootloader on disk 0 (remember it's installed on hda)
use Windows XP menu to launch windows 7

Out of the options you proposed I think I'll try this one as it appears to be the less difficult. Just to confirm, after switching the bios disk boot order, I need to install grub on disk 0 which will now be sda correct?_________________Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition
MSI ATI R4650 PCIe2
250GB SATA Drive
4GB Corsair DDR2

"After that, remember that you need to change bios disk order to boot specific windows"....not sure I follow what you mean by this statement. I thought that by changing the bios disk boot order to

sda
hda
sdb

and installing grub on /dev/sda, it would allow me to boot into any of the three OS? I will go ahead and create one entry in grub.conf. Also, I found this on google and maybe it can work for my situation. Below is the link: